On Being in Hindu and Muslim Cities - Redux
Okay, at the outset, this is about the cities where I have lived or am living.
I come from a coastal town in Kerala, called Alappuzha, populated with Christians where I live. The Arabian Sea is just about a kilometer away from my house and one can hear the rumble of the sea all day long. The people most near the coast are generally Christain-fishermen predominantly from the Latin Catholic community.
Just after my house, where the ‘Christian border’ ends, starts the Hindu area populated predominantly by Ezhavas. The Hindu area in turn is adjacent to a Muslim populated area. Now you get the picture, if you are familiar with India, that is. The demography would inevitably suggest that our area is predominantly populated by lower-caste, lower-class people who are mostly unemployed, sometimes lumpenised and severly poor. Because of these reasons, strangely, we are generally secular and live in apparent harmony. This harmony is best symbolised by the local Ezhava temple which blares out popular Hindu and Christain songs every evening. If one goes inside the small yellow temple, one can also see photos of Christ rubbing shoulders with Islamic prayer icons and other Hindu dieties. As an aside I should add that the temple doesn’t blare out Muslim songs—in fact I myself haven’t heard much of Muslim prayer songs, except for the Urdu Sufi songs I have become habituated to eversince I shifted base from Kerala.
Lest I deviate from my point, because my writing is bovine and I chew on cud endlessly, I need to come back to my central issue—cities. My first sojourn after Kerala was Lucknow, a former area under the Mughals and the site of the first War of Independance against the British. The University centre where I studied is located on the banks of river Gomti, which is a branch of the mighty Ganges which flows through the adjacent city of Kanpur. One of the gates of the campus has an inscription about the battle of the first independance. The residency of the British which was hit by cannon balls and gun shots during the uprise is located only a few kilometers away. Marx talks about river Gomti, referring to it as river Goomti, in one of his tracts called The Siege and Storming of Lucknow. While analysing the colonial rule Marx seems to suggest how colonialism in a back-hand sort of way would hlep Indians ‘re-generate’ themselves.
When one roams around the streets of Lucknow, with its old Mughal structures, like the Bhool Bhulaya with its mysteriously huge well into which a native is supposed to have jumped with the key to a treasure, and old Mosques from which an occasional Quwwali arise, one gets constantly bombarded by the street vendors’ chaste Urdu. This is akin to getting addressed in classical Shakespearean or Chaucerean flourish when one is about to haggle with a street harlot or cab driver in Bronx, New York. But one most important thing that I didn’t miss in Lucknow was beef because of its Muslim past and its old lanes where you get the whiff of kebabs or beef cultlets along with biriyani. Luknow was Muslim and comfortable, in short.
Cut to Hyderabad where I came to do my MPhil and subsequently PhD. Hyderabad is the city of Nizams with a Muslim cultural milieu and therefore beef kebabs and biriyani. The city is also where Golconda is located, once the biggest diamond mine in the world and the source of Nizam’s much touted wealth. At one point, before the advent of corporate wealth, the Nizam of Hyderabad was the richest individual in the world, as testified by The Times. One can still see water ducts which was built to bring water from one end of the city to Golconda. The fresh water source is located near the silicon valley of Hyderabad, Hitech City. During the last monsoon water overflowed from this source and inundated the surrounding area. Now a sheet of water has blanketed a near-by hotel and an adjoining park where code-writing software couples from companies like Motorola, Microsoft etc. used to come to write stuff which were infinetly more creative. Hyderabad is also a city which has succesfully resisted the onslaught of the rise of the Hindu right-wing BJP and Majlis a muslim dominated party consistenly wins assembly elections there. As if in vengeance BJP consistently wins in Secunderbad, the adjoining city.
My third sojourn, which is the current one, is Pune, a city which can be confidently called as a Hindu-dominated city—a city which has also witnessed years of anti-caste struggles led by B.R Ambedkar and Jyothirao Phule. Precisely because of the Hindu uppercaste inclination towards vegetarian food, the city is sorrowfully bereft of good non-veg food, or so I thought till last Saturday when I stumbled upon a Muslim restaurant which was serving delicious beef fry and biriyani. Although the taste of the fare was disinctly Marathi, it was nevertheless delicious. I hope Pune has more surprises in store for me.
